INmusic festival

After goth pioneers the Birthday Party called it quits in 1983, singer/songwriter Nick Cave assembled the Bad Seeds, a post-punk supergroup featuring former Birthday Party guitarist Mick Harvey on drums, ex-Magazine bassist Barry Adamson, and Einsturzende Neubauten guitarist Blixa Bargeld. With the Bad Seeds, Cave continued to explore his obsessions with religion, death, love, America, and violence with a bizarre, sometimes self-consciously eclectic hybrid of blues,...

The Prodigy navigated the high-wire, balancing artistic merit and mainstream visibility with more flair than any electronica act of the 1990s. Ably defeating the image-unconscious attitude of most electronic artists in favor of a focus on nominal frontman Keith Flint, the group crossed over to the mainstream of pop music with an incendiary live experience that approximated the original atmosphere of the British rave scene even while leaning uncomfortably close to...

System of a Down founder Serj Tankian was born on August 21, 1967, in Beirut, Lebanon. He and his family immigrated to Los Angeles in 1975. He studied marketing at California State University and started his own software company before beginning his music career with the formation of System of a Down in 1995. In 1998, System of a Down signed on to Rick Rubin's American imprint, and over the following seven years released five well-received albums, the second of which...

One of the most successful hip-hop acts to emerge from Great Britain, Stereo MC's formed in London in 1985, when rapper Rob B. (born Rob Birch) and DJ/producer the Head (Nick Hallam) formed the Gee Street label as a means of promoting their music. Gee Street soon signed a distribution deal with the New York-based 4th & Broadway label, and a series of singles followed before Stereo MC's' debut album, "33-45-78", surfaced in 1989.
After the departure of founding...

Hailing from London, Hot Chip entered the picture with the release of their 2000 debut, Mexico. The EP was released by Victory Garden Records, a label owned and operated by members of London's resident lo-fi psychedelic rock institution, Southall Riot. The Mexico EP was a hypnotic wash of subtle -- nearly subliminal -- pulse-like techno beats, acoustic guitars, and plinky pianos, but the vocals were the true star of the show (no small feat in a musical climate...

Tinariwen is a Tuareg group that performs in a Middle Eastern/African style similar to artists like Ali Farka Toure or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. All of the musicians originating from the southern Sahara, the group's name, meaning "empty places," is a reflection of their lands of origin. The band formed in the rebel camps of Colonel Ghadaffi, as each of the musicians had been forced from their nomadic lifestyle into involuntary military service. Surrounded by a...

Amadou et Mariam, once billed as The Blind Couple of Mali, are just that, a blind husband and wife musical act. Guitarist Amadou met singer Mariam at the Institute for Young Blind People in Bamako, Mali. They are Bambara, significant because Bambara music bears obvious resemblances to American blues. Their largely acoustic debut, 'Sou Ni Tile', connects America's Mississippi delta, Mali and the Middle East. The root is Malian traditional music, but the Syrian,...

It's been long, far too long, but they're back with a box full of tricks and a fistful of treats. Back once again it's The Go! Team, with another treble-heavy adventure in audio, their second album Proof of Youth due for release on 10 September 2007.
2004's Mercury Music Prize nominated and 250k selling debut album Thunder Lightning Strike came from
nowhere to win plaudits and fans alike worldwide with its hybrid of old school hip hop, noise band work outs, TV...